Spotted on a motel room door:
I wonder if all the peepholes in the motel were installed with a similar lack of attention to detail; it was recently renovated, so this is new work.
For sure, they’ll never be properly adjusted …
Category: Machine Shop
Mechanical widgetry
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Herringbone Pinion Gears
These herringbone gears were part of updating my old Thing-O-Matic:
Herringbone gears with nut inserts But, as the saying goes, that’s not a herringbone gear. This is a herringbone gear:
Bethlehem Steel – 48 inch rolling mill gears We always read the signage:
Bethlehem Steel – 48 inch rolling mill gears – description They’re parked in front of the National Museum of Industrial History in Bethlehem, PA.
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Park Spoke Tension Meter vs. 20 inch Wheel Spokes
Obviously, the good folks at Park Tool never anticipated a three-cross spoke pattern on a 20 inch wheel:
Park Tool Spoke Tension Meter vs 406 wheel It’s my trusty Park Tool TM-1 Spoke Tension Meter, unchanged since shortly after the turn of the millennium.
For future reference, the rebuilt wheel spoke tensions came out around 25, slightly lower than the 27-ish I measured on Mary’s bike; it didn’t occur to me to measure the tension until after I’d relaxed the spokes. I’ll ride it for a while before doing any tweakage.
The spoke pattern is pretty close to four-cross, due to the large-flange Phil Wood hubs:
Tour Easy Front Spoke Pattern Which makes for a hella-strong wheel, particularly seeing as how it’s very lightly loaded. The Tour Easy we got for our lass came with a radially spoked rim around a Phil hub.
I transferred the hub and laced spokes intact to the new rim by the simple expedient of duct-taping the spokes into platters, removing the nipples, stacking the rims, sliding the spokes across into their new homes, reinstalling the nipples, then tightening as usual.
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Presta Valve to Schraeder Hole Adapter
The front rim on my Tour Easy developed a distinct bulge, of the sort usually caused by ramming something, but I’m not Danny McAskell and the bulge got worse over the course of a few weeks, suggesting the rim was deforming under tire pressure. Having ridden it upwards of 35 k miles with plenty of trailer towing and too much crushed-stone trail riding, the brake tracks were badly worn and it’s time for a new rim.
An Amazon seller had an identical (!) rim, except for the minor difference of having a hole sized for a Schraeder valve stem, rather than the Presta valves on the original rims. One can buy adapters / grommets, but what’s the fun in that?
The brake track walls are 1.5 mm thick on the new rim and a scant 1.0 mm on the old rim, so, yeah, it’s worn.
A few measurements to get started (and for future reference):
Presta to Schraeder Adapter – dimension doodle If you don’t have an A drill, a 15/64 inch drill is only half a mil larger and, sheesh, anything close will be fine.
Introduce a suitable brass rod to Mr Lathe:
Presta-Schraeder Adapter – parting off Break all the edges and drop it in place:
Presta-Schraeder Adapter – installed One could argue for swaging the adapter to fit flush against the curved rim, but commercial adapters don’t bother with such refinements and neither shall I.
The 7.0 mm length got shortened to fit flush with the center of the rim:
Presta-Schraeder Adapter – valve stem installed It’s brass, because the rim is heaviest on the far side where the steel pins splicing the ends live, and, with the tube & tire installed, the rim came out almost perfectly balanced. Which makes essentially no difference whatsoever, of course.
The shiny new rim sports shiny new reflector tape (from the same stockpile, of course).
That was easy …
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Monthly Science: Cheese Slicer Epoxy Coating vs. Water
Ten months ago, I cleaned the corrosion off our favorite cheese slicer:
Cheese slicer – aluminum corrosion After cleaning, I coated it with XTC-3D epoxy:
Cheese Slicer – epoxy coat – detail We’ve been using it daily ever since and it spends most of its life drip-drying in the dish drainer. I added a third opening to the cheerful orange measuring spoon holder just for the slicer.
A few weeks ago I noticed corrosion once again growing on the handle:
Cheese Slicer – epoxy coat – corrosion – detail I think the rot comes from water diffusing through the epoxy, rather than gross leaks through damage or pinholes. The tip of the handle has the most corrosion, probably due to the water drop hanging there, even though it also has the thickest epoxy coating: it cured with the handle pointing downward.
Verily, rust never sleeps …
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Bathroom Sink Drain: Epoxy Touchup
The glaring white ring around the drain comes from Magic Porcelain Chip Fix epoxy:
Bathroom Sink Drain – Epoxy fill What looks like a blob on the left side covers the missing chip, with the rest of the ring filled in to make it look like I knew what I was doing. The drain dried out while we were on vacation, having been scrubbed clean before we left, making for the best surface preparation I could provide.
As it turns out, our resident iron bacteria took about a week to set up shop along the bottom of the ring, producing a pair of small rust-colored dots that will inevitably spread to encompass the whole thing. They’re endemic in the plumbing, impossible to kill off, and nothing more than an unsightly nuisance.
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Tour Easy Daytime Running Light: 18650 Cell Extraction Tab
The running lights on our Tour Easy fairing sit just about perfectly level, despite how they appear in relation to the fairing edge:
Flashlight Mount – LC40 – finger ball – side And, because they’re firmly attached to the fairing mount, there’s no way to tilt them to extract the 18650 cell.
This took entirely too long to figure out:
Lithium 18650 Cell Extractor Tab The LC40 end caps have a recess exactly where it’ll do the most good: capturing the tab inside the cap means it can’t interfere with the rear contact spring:
Lithium 18650 Cell Extractor Tab – Anker LC40 Swapping cells no longer requires muttering!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 